Orphée

That, if you guys are wondering, is a picture of cars streaking past Stamford House last night. I had actually been trying to capture a scene in the shop windows, of a group of people having a little wine party in a closed furniture shop, but my phone's camera isn't good enough for long-distance espionage. But it is good enough - surprisingly good, in fact - for any day-to-day photo-taking that you can imagine, and especially good for night shots. I think this journal will become pretty polluted with pictures soon, at least until the novelty wears out.

Went to watch Jean Cocteau's Orphée yesterday at the Museum with Joel and a group of HC Humanities chaps, and found the place festooned for a real bash. The building was wrapped in copious amounts of red, and even had those swiveling spotlights on the lawn that you usually only come across in "20th Century Fox" logos. Apparently, it was a HSBC event that had something to do with a women's golf tournament. It sure looked posh; and I guess it's something worthwhile for the Museum to host, since it does bring a real frission of life into the district.

As dignitaries and debutantes delighted themselves on champagne and tapas upstairs, we found ourselves in the basement Cinémathèque watching this film which is the first of a series of films portraying Greek mythology. I can't honestly say I liked watching it, but I have to admit that it is a pretty dense and meaty film, drawing from the traditions of French absurdism, Greek mythos, contemporary politics and perhaps even a dash of (dare I say it?) impressionism. The imagery and plotline are strange, to put it mildly, and outright surreal at times. It's certainly not a film to be watched if you're searching for entertainment, though I do get the feeling that it tickles some deeper satisfaction at having watched something inscrutably meaningful.

There are some ideas that are pretty innovative. If you're familiar with the original Orpheus myth, you would see how apt it is to cast Hades as a woman, thereby making Orpheus' journey into the netherworld into a product of both his love for his wife, and a certain fascination with the dark seduction of Death. And the heroic epic is rendered absurdly trite by being cast in terms of a domestic tragicomedy. But at other times it strikes me as purely eye-candy. But, to be fair, Cocteau does have his characters remind us not to try too hard to understand it, and if one can submit to the implications of unfettered postmodernism then I guess the film is a pretty holistic investigation of what that philosophy could mean to the artistic world.

And works like this make it clear that when I talk about film, I should be more precise. There are the movies, which are pictures that move, and then there is film, which are pictures that move people. The former tend to be justified by the people that watch them, and the latter are justified by the people who create them. And so, films don't need an audience to exist in the form that they do, at least not so much as movies.

And I also wonder whether it'd be appropriate to introduce this type of cinematography to my kids. It's not so much that they won't understand - I doubt that the difference a few years of experience makes will be all that much when watching something as amorphous as Orphée. But it could be premature, jumping several stages of mental maturing, and effectively cheating them out of the satisfaction of finding out these things by themselves. But what exhilaration it would be, if it were possible to turn English lessons into a pseudo-film club! We're always talking about brave new ways to teach, and perhaps it's time that more scrutiny is placed by the curriculum on this medium that has, without a doubt, grown into something that is culturally important.

Cross Country

The new camera in my phone, though liberating in how it opens any opportunity to being recorded visually, isn't really much good for photography per se. There just isn't enough detail and stability in a camera phone, even though it has 3.2 megapixels in it. The role of the pictures that camera phones take, I think, is for storytelling, and illustrations are just as legitimate a literary device as, for example, rhyme and rhythm.

So, today, the school had its cross-country meet, which didn't cross anything resembling a countryside at all, the route only winding around school. And it very nearly didn't happen, too - for the first time in a month, it actually rained in the morning this morning, and though I usually love raintime, dread quickly followed the thrill of surprise at waking up to the patter of raindrops, since if the run couldn't be done today, it would have been postponed to tomorrow, which would have unravelled all my lesson plans. I had planned to lose the two lessons I was scheduled to have today with 2L and 2N; but I cannot afford to lose the six lessons scheduled for tomorrow. Talk about planning yourself into a corner. In the military, this would be anathema. But given the restrictions of mark submission deadlines and the need to work with other people rather than dictate a schedule to them, this ninth-week cramming is regrettably unavoidable, I think.

It has been too long since I ran the last time, and though it certainly felt good to be going at something above strolling pace once again (and around the route that we used to run in Sec 1 and 2, no less!), I could feel the lack of training in the way the nausea tempered the exhilaration. Ah well - I'm still alive, and that's the important thing, I guess. And all the kids finished alive too, which a throwback from the Army days tells me is something to be relieved about.

Stayed back today, despite it being a half-day, to plan tomorrow's 2-hour lesson with L3, my new CSE class. It's pretty convoluted - each CSE student has a different designation for his different subject classes, on top of which his civics group (I guess you could call it that) has a designation too. And within a subject, the teachers are supposed to carve the class up into levels, like how you do interval training. Which gives rise to very complicated and tailored lessons. And coming up with something for them to do on a topic that I myself haven't grasped fully yet was a dodgy experience, to say the least. Every line on the worksheet was second- and third-guessed, and after a while I guess you could say that I was making the worksheet to teach me more than to teach the class about political philosophy. But the lesson will happen tomorrow no matter what, and I hope the planning pays off.

The staff room was really peaceful today, with almost everyone gone. I find that I am most productive when I am alone, although the satisfaction that comes from that kind of solitary work can't match up to seeing the product of that work interacting with real people. So it was a day of good work, but the fun effectively ended when the school was dismissed this morning. Tomorrow, in contrast, will be overwhelmingly social, ending off with, hopefully, an afternoon of free time, as the term draws to an end and I prepare to wind up all the classes' work for a fresh start two weeks later.

Loose Ends

After two years of my trusty K700i in JC, and then another two years of camera-less antique phones, I finally changed my handset yesterday, and now I'm the proud owner of a K800i. Not really a quantum leap, in terms of phone capabilities; it's more like an enhancement of existing features. But anyway, it came free of charge because it was the perk for renewing my mum's phone plan, so I took it. And, on an off-chance, it also means that the new phone has allowed me, for the first time since I got the K700i, to export the pictures I took with the old phone into the computer, via Bluetooth and the data cable that came with the new device.

So here's a sample of the odds and ends that ended up in my phone over the course of JC and in the period just following ORD, which includes the Southeastern Coast Australian sojourn. The one above is the first photo I ever took with a camera phone - it's the present that Young gave me at the end of Texprog. The one below is the last photo I took with the K700i - the beach at Surfers Paradise by dawn. The rest of them I've posted on Facebook, so do take a gander if you're interested!

How remarkable it is, then, to be able to salvage these photos; that they have remained intact for four years on the memory of the old phone. It's like having a part of my neglected memory coloured in again; it reminds me that there were many, many things that happened in JC that I don't have a real pictorial record of, and never really thought about again, subsumed as these memories were under the slough of new experiences. Some of the pictures, though, make me pause in surprise; I did not remember that I had taken these pictures, and now that they have resurfaced, it feels like I've received a coded message from my past self. It's a time bomb of meaning, set to go off in your mind only at the perfect time, to make you draw connections that are poignant in their seeming prescience, that reveal meanings that are clearly coincidental and retrospective, but that are also so evocative that their power arouses suspicions of a deeper, unperceived pattern behind all this that is evidence of an obscure self exercising a will over my consciousness that I had not even been aware of.

Who can unravel the deeper convolutions of meaning and memory, to say why sometimes time runs backwards and loops around to bring something from the past into the present, and thereby to portray the present in a new, stunning light? Winterson discussed this problem before, in Gut Symmetries, of people trying to outrun their past, only to find themselves, bewilderingly, running into signs of the past again and again. I think there is some meaning underlying these enigmatic patterns, though I'm not sure that I should read so much into them. They have such compelling things to say; but to listen to them too closely is to go down the road of sentimental nostalgia - which, with so many things to look forward to - is distracting and even inhibiting, don't you think?

But those were good times, nevertheless, good times indeed...

*

Going to teach political philosophy on Wednesday in a 2-hour lesson with a new class. It's a daunting prospect; not only is the duration going to make this the longest class I have ever taught, and not only am I facing a new set of students that I will have to get to know from scratch, but the content matter is intimidatingly dense. And whoever planned the schedule only gave 2 weeks to cover this field that can occupy academics with years of study on end. How, then, within the limitations of time and ability, to give an overview of this topic without offending it by being too shallow and simplistic?

This will, after all, remain an English class, and for me it will always be more important that they write well, rather than what they write per se. However, writing well also has to do with how well you grasp the content matter and its myriad convolutions and implications, and how well you take the facts and are able to craft a pattern and meaning out of them that trounces others' interpretations of the same facts. It's about the quality of critical thinking, and if I am to assess them fairly for this, I will need to master those facts myself first. And so I face the uphill task of priming myself over two days in a subject that I am not really interested in, and have not really been exposed to.

Went with Joel to Suntec today to run over the materials. Over coffee and tea in Starbucks, sitting next to the plate glass windows with people coming and going outside, and others discussing business and studies around us, we pored over our respective lesson materials. As he said, it felt somewhat like pre-A Levels studying again, with, of course, the exception that this time round, we were doing it wholly voluntarily, or if not, then out of an acknowledged moral obligation from within to do justice to our kids, rather than because of any external pressure. I wonder, too, if undergraduate life will be like this. Some patterns are inescapable, and when I read dispatches from abroad, studying anywhere else sounds eerily like studying here. But surely a change in setting will make some difference? If you don't wrap yourself too tightly in the familiar rituals of studying, and have the time and presence of mind to be surprised by what you may encounter, then the place you are at will matter to you. If not, then I guess it is true; studying is studying, to paraphrase a realist mantra.

*

I realise I haven't been keeping up in this journal as often as I would like to. It's a mixture of a pressing workload (it's the 9th week, and it's marks submission season!) and a delight in daily humdrum. It's not that nothing is happening; it's just that the things that are happening, though delightful to me, may be too far removed from your experience to be meaningful to you as a reader. So I have tried my best to meet you halfway with an entertaining rendition of things that are really unremarkable, and, failing to do so, have ended several entries with the "Delete" button.

Forgive me for this, and rest assured that life is still grand nowadays. And thank you for reading, as always.

Haven't been writing as much as I would have liked, because work compels me to put aside non-essential activities. It's the end of the term, and it's the season of mark-submissions, and thirty-odd comprehension scripts left to mark is a pretty insistent argument. But I'm happy to report that I'm on track and pushing any harder would just be inefficient.

Been rushing through a lot of material these last few days, trying to squeeze as much out of the Reflective Writing module as possible. Ran through Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit in a double period, and quickly changed gears to do a period on travel literature, covering Theroux, Sarah Turnbull (Almost French) and Iyer. And next week, will bring in Amélie to demonstrate biographical writing in a larger framework of narration. The supreme problem is, as always, time. I don't have time to do justice to all these works, to give them anything beyond the most cursory of glances. And some of the ideas I'm trying to put across to them must seem like leaps of faith to the kids, because I don't have the time to logically develop arguments out to a conclusion (this effect being amplified by the fact that I've already done the thinking beforehand, and am wont to assume that everyone else will get it straightaway too). I think there is a case in favour of cutting down the scope so that there is more depth - but then, I fear running out of things to say more than not having enough time to say what I want.

I hope, though, that this at least whets their appetite to read. And the best-case scenario would be that they'll start writing voluntarily, and start writing literary works, at that, rather than the usual functional writing that is unavoidable for normal life.

Ms. Ong points out the tendency that I have to over-teach. Coming up with material to bring into class is not so much of a problem for me - the issue is how to discern the usefulness and effectiveness of the methods that I'm trying out. I want them to see certain things, certain patterns in the text, but the tendency is for me to get lost in the self-indulgence, so I am just running through the ideas because the ideas sound nice, without the due regard that I should be giving to whether or not they are getting it. Language is communication - but I find myself too enraptured with the process of expression to give enough attention to whether or not they are able to properly and accurately perceive what I am trying to communicate.

Perhaps it is approaching the time when I should ask for a review, an after-action report, as it were. Perhaps it's time to find out just how much these lessons have helped. But that calls for a certain level of confidence in my own abilities in the classroom that I haven't found yet. Open-mindedness and the willingness to accept the opinions of others is, quite clearly, a function of how confident you are in the set of convictions that you are sitting on.

*

YJ left two days ago for Melbourne, in a flurry of activity. He hadn't realised that his flight had been brought forward by half an hour. And so, ten minutes before departure time, with the screens blinking "Gate Closing" with deceptive serenity, we rushed to the departure gate, snapped a few hurried photos, did the hug-and-handshake line, and then he was through, getting his passport stamped and being swept away by the earnest tides of the transit area.

This marks the start of this year's departure season. This circle of friends will start thinning out again, as one by one we take our turns at the departure gates. And though it would be nice if my own turn were not so far away still, I find that I don't begrudge people leaving first, in the same way that I was jealous of people leaving two years ago. It really makes a difference when you know that you have a turn at this, and then every departure between now and then is a preview of what your own one could look like. The only thing, of course, is to keep anticipation from turning into impatience and weariness.

*

Random moments come back to me. Walking back towards the tower block from the JC canteen, I am caught up in the way the old tower stands out against the brilliant blue sky, with clouds garnishing the vista and a great old tree making a fascinating tesselation in front of the building. It strikes me again, this parallel, this miraculous chance to come back, to return to this place and to see other people who are going through what I had gone through.

One Foot Forward

I haven't been keeping up with writing here, because I've been terribly busy lately, as is usually the case when the end of the term approaches. Steadily worked my way through the compositions, and now I'm right in the middle of marking a bit more than 80 comprehension scripts. These are not so hard to mark; they are just tedious, and I begin to get depressed because I find myself having no choice but to fail so many people. I daresay that the passage we took out of Lewis's The Four Loves was too advanced for Secondary Two comprehension. Too many convoluted sentences that make it even harder to comprehend the convoluted arguments; Lewis's writing requires a certain degree of prescience and precedence to understand, I think. On the one hand, you need to read really carefully and be perceptive about how he uses language. But on the other hand, there is also a sense that you'll really only fully appreciate his writing if you already know, on some level, what he is talking about. Your individual past then becomes a key to unlocking his text; his work becomes a catalyst to vocalise things that you already knew but never formally understood why.

But to ask Sec 2 kids to do this is a bit much, I think. I see massive moderation in the near future.

Anyway, in between ticking scripts, I've also had my last lesson with my ProEd class. I'm going to have to give them back to their real teacher because she's returning to work tomorrow. A part of me doesn't want to, even though one less class means that I have 10 periods a week only, and on Thursdays and Fridays my work commitments effectively end at 9.30am. It's only been four weeks, but I feel like we've established some kind of rapport and working standard, which, I think - I hope - has given rise to steadily improving abilities. I am training them to use English, but on another level I also want them to learn to be writers, and I think I see the beginnings of promise in that aspect. And anyway, you don't work with people for four weeks without forming a sort of attachment to them. And all this will be taken away soon, for better or for worse.

But I've finished my piece, I've said what I wanted to say, and everything's set to make a clean break. And soon, my 2F stint will become the stuff of memory and nostalgia. I hope they remember what I've said.

And also, tomorrow, YJ is going to fly off to Melbourne to start his medical course there. Had a farewell thing for him yesterday, starting in the afternoon. The guys had dinner, I believe, but due to my comprehension commitments I only joined them after that, at KHwee's place. And it was a night of Munchkins and poker; for myself, not understanding very well how poker works, I fell asleep at 2am, to the sound of chips chattering their way from hand to hand, shouts of surprise and cries of dismay forming the crescendoes of the table.

It occurs to me that YJ is only the second of our class to leave, the first having been Sots on the PSC scholarship two years ago - our China classmates notwithstanding, of course. After all this waiting, after all this time, we are finally starting down the next leg of our journeys. With one foot on the new path, and one last glance backwards - I imagine that every time someone leaves. We move forward, always moving forward, but we will come back. Our path may take us elsewhere and far away, but we have already seen our destination and know that someday coming back will be necessary.

Heh, I know I shouldn't wax lyrical about these guys. It does them a disservice, in a way, and I'm pretty sure they wouldn't stand for it for an instant. So I'll say this straight out - I don't know what the effect of up to a year apart will have on the solid bonds that we still have after almost five years out of our old class. The last time we parted, I had not expected anything to remain after the first year, and thank God that I was shown to be so sorely mistaken. This time round, the conditions are again radically different, but I find grounds for hope. And whether or not the hope will turn out to be disappointing or surprising, I find that having the grounds for hope itself is already a privilege in this often dark and uncertain world. And this privilege - these people - they make me feel ridiculously lucky.

*

I haven't been out on a Sunday morning since I finished Army, and this morning, between leaving KHwee's place and going to church, I had one glorious hour filled with the early clarity of morning sunlight. The day, empty of happenings and still being birthed, seemed clean and promising. Anything was possible; later, these options would narrow down and close themselves off one by one, but at that time everything was still yet to be. And walking through the streets of Kembangan, I was mesmerised by the play of light on the buildings and the roads, on the people stirring in the quiet streets and the traffic whispering in the distance. I haven't had a moment of such clarity since the time I booked out on Good Friday and found my way, that morning, at Marina Bay. To recapture it this morning was magical and breathtaking.

Grades

I have developed an auto-immune response to grading assignments. This is, of course, not to be confused with marking them. Marking is okay - marking compositions always harbours a certain element of anticipation and surprise, because you don't ever know what the kids will return you. You throw topics at them that will hopefully pique their interest, and they respond in often unexpected, hopefully remarkable ways. And I feel that marking has a real practical purpose, and, just as a piece of writing is an act of communication, annotating a student's script is also a form of teaching. Squiggles and symbols aren't as effective as real words and comments on a script, and once my kids get over the prejudice against red ink and the tendency of equating lots of red with lots of bad stuff, I do find that they are appreciative of the effort. Marking, then, is an integral part of teaching.

Grading, however, is different. It is a means of sorting out your students, to let them know which among them are allegedly superior students, who can produce higher-quality work. And I see how it can be useful, especially when you're new to a class and you need a benchmark to map what your class's abilities are like. But once you transform grading into an objective, and you venerate the grades and make them a benchmark for your performance, then the act of grading gets twisted into some perverse self-indulgent exercise.

It will strike you, straightaway, how arbitrary grading an essay is. If you were grading a math paper or a science script, the answers are right there for you to compare with, and it is clear where the student has got it right, and where he has lost the logic. However, in English, besides the comprehension short-answer questions, such factual checking is impossible, and grading comes down to assessing the relative quality of language use and content, the relative interest value in what the student has to say, and how he chooses to say it. And it is immediately obvious how judging the quality of these aspects is highly subjective. I personally find myself prone to being swept away by sentimentality, for example - and, when I try to stop myself being carried away, I am prone to over-compensating in the opposite direction. So you see the slippery slope of the act of grading.

And then, you add in the incompatibility of the criteria being used to assess the work. A numerical grade indicates something straightaway - that one student produces better work than others. But this misses out the nuances. So I have students scoring the same numerical mark, while one relies on the seductive power of his language to speak of nothing in particular, and the other whacks you over the head blatantly with incredibly complex ideas. And what of the two students who get the same Language mark, but one suffers for inappropriate sentence structures, and the other suffers for using the wrong tenses? Who's to say that one sin is greater than another? How can we say one linguistic achievement is as equally valuable as another?

Of course, then you try to rationalise with yourself, that the ends will justify the means, and the grade should not just reflect how masterfully the student handles his techniques for expression, but how masterfully he uses those techniques for a specific and clearly identified artistic purpose. The grade then reflects the quality of the communication - whether or not he uses the appropriate literary and structural techniques to give a nuanced impression of his central ideas, and equally whether or not his central ideas lend themselves, by their complexity, to be expressed lyrically and strikingly. But then, we all know how objective communication is. Language is communication - and communication is a function of expression and perception, and there's no alienating oneself and one's subjective influences from the process.

And then - the most irritating part - is the impression that you cannot produce a set of outlandish grades. I am told that my ProEd class should be averaging C's, but I am consistently getting a borderline A average from the composition assignments I have given them. Perhaps, on the one hand, I am looking out for different things when I grade these assignments. Perhaps I am approaching the grading process wrongly, emphasising the student's artistic flair when I should be looking at basic technical aspects like whether he has constructed a conventionally acceptable plot arc. But maybe, just maybe, they are producing higher grades because they are improving in the subject? I dare not think so, because my colleague assures me that they cannot be performing well. So here's another perverse self-reflexive influence in grading: the suppression of high marks because one is prejudiced against the abilities of the class. But then, how do you separate the influence of prejudice from real improvement in language, without the prism of experience to guide you?

So when I grade the assignments, I find myself second-guessing my decisions every step of the way, and succeeding to a large extent to poke holes in my rationales, with such fatal effectiveness that I am wholly unconfident in my ability to produce a proper set of grades, the quality of the marking being another matter entirely. I've tried as many methods as I can think of - first impressions grading (which causes me to have to go through the scripts again to revise impulsively inflated or deflated marks), sorting into bands (which is easier at first, until you have to distinguish grades within a particular band), and leaving all the grading till the end, when I've marked all the scripts and have an impression of who has better work, and use the scripts to cross-reference one another (which seems to produce the most holistic set of grades with the widest range, but costs a heck of a lot of time!). And, when you think about it properly, what is the point of grading anyway? I find it too much work to be worthwhile - just give a letter grade, and emphasise individual improvement rather than competition among peers. Isn't competition counter-productive, when you're learning how to use a language? Why spend time grading their work so much, when the wider world will be the ultimate judge of whether their grasp of language is adequate? What does it matter what a teacher thinks about your work compared with your peers' work, when only the real world will give recognition that matters to truly beautiful pieces?

Toa Payoh

Back from another surprising day of visiting my relatives. And between bouts of Cantonese that are too fast to follow, that leave me in an almost catatonic state of confusion, and the acute kindness of relatives that have last met me when I was a toddler, relatives that I have no memory of, save for the wholesome homemade tidbits made by their own hands that always appear without fail on our Chinese New Year snack shelves whether we visit them or not, I begin to detect the beginnings of the pain of parting. There is a special sadness, in saying your goodbyes, when there is no guarantee that the goodbye would be followed by a reunion. I find myself starting the process now, in this bout of visiting; and the process will end in August, at the Departure Gates.

Spent the evening in Toa Payoh, visiting my parents' friend from their university days, and playing with her three chihuauas and one ancient white-furred dog as old as my earliest memories. For some reason, that dog never liked me, and I fear it never will, even as, or perhaps because, it grows older and wiser. But even this yearly rejection is comforting in its familiarity. And then, went to the old Toa Payoh church, my first church, and was surprised to see the same priest that I remembered from childhood still celebrating the Eucharist in the old way, even though the church surrounding him had been renovated almost beyond recognition. Singing the old hymns, the ones that worship rather than evangelise, sent chills down my spine. And after dinner, walked down the old Toa Payoh streets with my parents and Marcus, reminiscing about how the town used to be like, back in the days when Toa Payoh still had fields and cousins were few and we played Police and Thief and Crocodile and What Time Is It Mr. Wolf in the great grassy expanse behind Block 157. Magic numbers for magic moments.

Toa Payoh still remains poignant with memories for me; every street and building has a tinge of nostalgia, and seeing the town change has only heightened that sense of familiarity, because you identify even more strongly with the parts that have stayed the same, and you recognise your memories in small, unexpected flashes, in nooks and corners scattered throughout the new visage of the place. Like I said, the skin and the flesh may change, but the bones of the town remain the same, and this makes any return an indulgence in memory.

In the night, especially, I feel a strong affinity with the place. The darkness melts away details and textures, and swallows up the embellishments, so whatever remains resembles what I remember more closely. By night, the same scene is leaner, as you can only see certain things, and you can concentrate and read these things with deeper detail. Spotlights reveal a familiar feature here, and throw the new things into stark silhouettes against which the old stuff are dramatically contrasted.

I think, before I go, I will take a camera and record down what I remember of the places that have been important to me, so that I can take these familiar things with me. And I will write another love story for this city, still deeply and faithfully loved, despite the glamorous allure of other places.

Chu San

Every new year, we have the once-a-year meeting with people that we're told are part of the family. It's telling that, even after 21 years of the same rounds of visiting, I can still meet strangers at family reunions. I guess, on one level, you can see this as a woeful state of affairs, how those of the youngest generations always get hopelessly entangled in the complex honorifics and designations of a Chinese family tree, and get lost among the boughs, and have to resort to the brutal English contingency of slashing away the intricate webs of relations with the scythe of "uncles" and "aunties". But then, if you accept that your orbit should take you out of your family circle, and that is how you avoid growing to be sheltered from the real world, then you would necessarily hardly come into contact with the more obscure branches of your relatives. Then they are just friends and acquaintances, and they bring the same magic and surprise that random encounters on the street with strangers can bring. And as you look across over the landscape that is created by your family tree, you see them blending into the general flow of humanity at the borders, like sky and sea coming together in the distance, and you realise that families don't necessarily need to be so exclusive. I find this to be a hopeful thought.

Anyway, this year, the new year has revolved around two main topics: travel and the Army. This has, of course, been quite fun for me, seeing that the latter is now safely behind me and the former lies tantalisingly ahead. But I daresay that it can't be much solace for Greg, facing as he is a book-in on Tuesday followed by a weekend burned for a live range. It is ironic that our two-year age gap has coincided so uncannily with the two-year Army period, meaning that just as I leave, he enters, and that I see in his experience shadows that are so poignantly familiar even as I try to peer ahead through the shrouds of time. When I see all the cousins in NS now, an impulse towards gloating collides with the awareness that they want sympathy, or rather, space in which to bear their burden with dignity.

But at any rate, getting together with family this year has been more meaningful for me. I guess partly it is the influence of time, and as I grow older, I find my interests and experiences aligning themselves more closely to recounting, and lending themselves more willingly to nostalgia. The stories I have to tell are becoming increasingly, I feel, stories that other people actually want to hear. And what better arena for storytelling than the yearly reunions at the new year?

And of course, there is also the realisation that next year, and the year after that, I probably wouldn't be back for this festive season. This makes this present season something to be cherished, and in some ways, also a chance to tie off loose ends, to leave a good impression this year that will last over the next few absences. The prospect of this not happening year after year with numbing familiarity adds a certain piquant flavour to the proceedings, and what you used to take for granted becomes significant again because of the imminent prospect of it being taken away from you. And so, around the various coffee tables and dinner tables, I have found myself listening more acutely, and engaging more willingly, and savouring the warmth and easy comfort of familiarity with a certain reluctance to let it go.

I wonder what it'll be like next year, somewhere colder, with no family around, and perhaps only a dinner in some unknown shop in a mythical Chinatown in lieu of the great reunion dinners of tradition. I wonder if the immediacy of a novel experience can overpower the homesickness that I feel certain will settle over me. Because, no matter how outward-looking I may make myself, no matter how much I smother myself in the glamour and novelty of Manhattan, no matter who I may find over there to confide in and lean on, there is no denying that fundamental fact, that nowhere else is the same as home.

*

Somehow, I am reminded this morning of a princess walking alongside an officer, the puffy glittering gown clashing so riotously with the camouflage fatigues that it formed an outrageous, absurd situation, transporting one beyond the boundaries of the ordinary, and casting drudgery in a new, liberating, compassionate light. To be at the confluence of such a delightfuly blatant contradiction...

*

And we're planning to go back to KK this holiday in March. Hatching the plan in the midst of visiting, we found that my school holidays coincide nicely with Greg's upcoming post-BMT block leave, and we and my uncle are throwing about the idea of scaling the mountain again. It is very tempting, to go back and complete something that I had not been able to do in January. And to go somewhere else is always attractive. If this actually happens, this will be the most immediate return I've ever done; something that, up till now, timing and finances had rendered impossible.

And in July, the Vietnam-Laos-Cambodia circuit is flirting with ideas of going to Tibet instead, of trundling up into the clouds on the highest railway on Earth, and to visit mystical Lhasa, and to look on the Potala Palace, and to let the imagination roam free in the thin air on the foothills of the Himalayas, and to search for a glimmer of truth in the streets of that ancient city, and to play with the idea of living closer to the sky than ever before.

Atonement

The Chinese New Year is here, and it's nice to be caught up in the atmosphere of the season. From my kids sending their new-year wishes, to the celebration in school incorporating familiar favourites, to the new-year goodies spilling out of shops and those selfsame shops closing early to allow the employees to return home for their family reunions - this is a warm feeling, an outpouring of goodwill and well-wishes, that is cloying in its sweetness and its nostalgia. And I realise this is also the last Chinese New Year I'd be passing before I fly off, so every moment is more poignant for possibly being the last of its kind. It is good to be home, now.

Spent lots of time catching up with old CHS acquaintances and friends today. Liang See came down to school, and I showed him around to meet the people who were still at the school after all these years. Then, went downtown and met up with KHwee, Ms. Ong and JY over lunch, chatting about school, the future, and US politics. I have said it before, and I will say it again - I will miss this simplicity, this familiar easiness, when I fly away.

Watched Atonement the movie today, and it was grand. The story isn't the easiest one to adapt into a movie; the book uses literary techniques that film is ill-equipped to replicate. The asides that the book's narrator has with the reader, breaking down the fourth wall in a way that is integral and central to how the book functions - this is singularly difficult for a movie to simulate. And the book is definitely more sensual, more tactile, because McEwan has the luxury of lingering over details in the book. The film is much more plot-driven than the book, and necessarily so, I think, which leaves out some of the sumptuousness and sensuality of the book's descriptions.

That being said, keeping in mind the technical restrictions of film, the movie is actually a surprisingly good adaptation. I particularly like how they did the ending - that interview scene was a stroke of genius to render the critical epilogue of the book. And the scenes are uncannily similar to how I imagined it when I read the book. There are beautiful moments - that great panning shot of the detritus and depravity of war gathered on the beach at Dunkirk, the scene with Briony holding the hand of Luc Carnet, and that final interview. There were moments that discomfited me because they emphasised some points in the book so blatantly, which detracts from the subtlety of the original story-telling; for example, it is much less of an unquestionable given in the book that Lola had in fact been attacked by Marshall. But these moments are forgivable - and do not hinder overmuch the movie becoming a moving and faithful piece of art in its own right. The movie seems to me to do the same thing to the book as a harmonising line does to a melody. And need I point out how rare it is for a movie adaptation to add something unique and worthwhile to the experience of reading the original in book form, instead of detracting tragically from the delight the book invokes in the reader?

Anyway, the movie made me relook my favourite scene in the book again. It brought tears to my eyes the first time I read it, and the movie brought back a vivid echo of that feeling. It is the most sensitive love scene I have ever read, made all the more tragic by how it is spun out of thin air, based on mistaken identity and the bewilderment of a soldier, far away from home, facing the incredible prospect of imminent death among strangers. And Luc Cornet reaches out to Briony, thinking her to be a sweetheart from his younger days, crafting for her a vision of tender love in a blameless, easy pastoral world. For a while, Briony indulges the Frenchman's vision, and in taking on the role of the love of his childhood, she is also delivered from the spectre of her own guilt-stained life. For a few precious, fragile moments, she is no longer the child who brutally and self-righteously tore asunder the love between Cee and Robbie; she is someone to be loved and who can love back innocently and without any reservations.

*


These two new additions to the family arrived recently, and I thought to make a note of them here. The one on the left is C. S. Lewis' The Four Loves. From the writer that gave the world Narnia comes a book about how to treat other people with compassion. It arrived from Warwick a few weeks back - and imagine my surprise when I saw a passage from its introduction appearing on as the comprehension passage for my kids' test next week! It's amazing how these uncanny connections appear out of nowhere.

The one on the right is a particularly beautiful specimen of Wilde's A House of Pomegranates. This ninety-nine-year-old volume came out of a quaint little corner in London, and joins my copy of Ibsen's Peer Gynt in my modest collection of antique books. I've only ever read Wilde's plays before, but if his short fiction is anything like them, I'm sure I'll enjoy this as well. And with a book like this, I'm torn between bringing it out and showing it off, and keeping it at home to better preserve it in its fragility.

So, two new books that I will be sure to put at the top of my reading list. From across the sea they came (the latter having come twice, actually - but that is another story), and I am really touched that my friends abroad have taken the trouble and sent them all this way. Thank you deeply - these are truly beautiful gifts.

Ash Tuesday

By a strange astral coincidence, Ash Wednesday falls on Chinese New Year's Eve this year (for the uninitiated, Ash Wednesday is the first day of the season of Lent leading up to Easter, a season which has the same motivations as the Muslim Ramadan). And, since Ash Wednesday is a day of fasting and abstinence, it would clearly not sit well with the Chinese tradition of a reunion feast on Chu2 Xi1. So, as a nod to ethnic traditions, the Singapore Archdiocese decreed that Tuesday would be Ash Wednesday too, so people can choose to both fast and feast.

In church today, the Gospel was about hypocrisy, and how one should not donate, pray or fast conspicuously. The main idea, of course, is not that we shouldn't practice religion openly and keep it private, but that our motivations for practicing religion openly should be the right ones. Rather than professing belief in the divine as a way to gain favour and respect from men, we should worship with one objective only, which is to celebrate the immensity of God. And it's true, isn't it? Who has been so lucky as to never have encountered someone else who tries to bludgeon one with the awesome scale of his alleged faith? Piousness thus becomes a salve for a sense of inferiority; one hoards salvation in order to make oneself feel superior to others.

However, this is not to be confused with a humanistic approach to religion. Regarding the responsibility of helping God's people as the central aspect of public religion is different from regarding faith as some sort of self-affirmation; the former is based on generosity, the latter on selfishness. The former is founded on spreading the goodness of the divine in the world, the latter is about competing with others for the favour of heaven. And it is fatal, I think, for anyone to regard faith as a zero-sum game. Those people who regard those who don't follow their faith as necessarily condemned, those who think that you either believe or you don't, and that there can never be a middle ground, those who think that a soul unconverted is necessarily a soul lost to the fires of the Fiend - these people strike me as dangerous, in some way. They bend the unifying tendency of faith to promote conflict. They militarise a spiritual experience.

Anyway, Christianity has always seemed to me to be humanistic, and though I know I may be mistaken, I conjecture that a similar viewpoint is also tenable with regards to other religions. We speak of tending to the flock; we work miracles on each other; we save others. And the central message seems clear to me, that religion is about people, and faith is about God. And none of it is supposed to, or is inherently wont to, lead to conflict and competition. Souls cannot be commodified, haggled over, bought and sold, as if spirituality was a stock price hovering between the bull market of Paradise and the bear market of the Inferno. God's mercy and love, we are told, is limitless - why, then, shouldn't he save those not of the faith too? I think it's just a matter of degrees. Everyone gets saved, but in a different way, and perhaps with a different reward. But the difference is ultimately cosmetic, because everyone gets saved. And that is the important thing.

*

Hmm...I had not expected that track to run for so long. And I suppose this is kind of like inviting flamers to open fire. But what the heck - it's not as if divergent views are intolerable. Views only become condemnable when they start to hurt real people.

Anyway - so, Ash Tuesday. Going home with a smudge of ash on my forehead was a liberating experience, not only because of what happened in church, but also because no one else seemed to notice, or if they did, they had the grace not to do a double-take. Tolerance in a society is always precious, I think, and the ability to tolerate a wide spectrum of differences without tearing society apart is a rare gift indeed. Of course, I won't venture to say that wearing ash on your forehead is something radically deviant. If this were considered radically different, then we should start to worry about the narrowness of our society. But for me, it was something different. Something that set me apart, for that short hour or so, from the people around me, people who I have tried, out of the force of habit, to blend in with everyday. The ash was a moment of desocialisation, of differentiation that was frightening in its obviousness, and pleasurable because no one seemed to mind in the slightest.

Sometimes, it's just nice to stick out a bit.

Second Chances

I wonder what it's like to have a birthday in December. What it's like to have everyone celebrating their birthdays around you, and you waiting for your own magic date to come. I guess birthdays don't become stale, and when your birthday is doesn't really have a bearing on who you become. But I wonder: do December babies ever become impatient? Or, on seeing everyone around them commemorating the passing of another year with one foot in the past even as they face the future eagerly, do they enjoy being younger and delaying the inevitable like a death-row criminal is grateful for any postponement?

Was at TLJ's birthday party yesterday, and it was an occasion for reunion with all the people from the secondary-school days. There were also a few people from JC days - even a couple from Army days; but when three or more gather in the old spirit of the class of 4N, then we form a complete world unto ourselves, and the devil take everyone else! Heh, if I were not working in Chinese High now, I think I would have found our easy camaraderie and unassuming familiarity disconcerting. I had not originally expected my secondary-school links to persist beyond JC days; and their longevity now, the very vitality and healthfulness of the old friendships, are so far beyond what I had expected would befall us that it strikes me as somewhat unnatural. But, as my return to the old school has shown me, a lot of things may not change much at all, and surprise and incredulity are obstacles to a full appreciation of what has survived the test of time. It is like having the days of yore returned to you; you find an eddy in the stream of time and find your way back.

You know, I think now that the friendships and the culture that we had in our old class is utterly unique, not to be found again in any of the groups in which I may find myself in the future. It's just inconceivable, the kind of madness that we get up to, what we get away with when dealing with each other, and the amount of trust and simultaneous self-effacing indulgence that you need to sustain something like this. If you know what I mean. Yesterday, TLJ asked for a smart-casual dress-code; and since we all went way back, JY and the birthday boy's JC classmates decided to suggest that everyone appear in singlets and shorts. And the fact that everyone actually did appear in singlets and shorts says something about how much we know each other.

Here is a paradox for you, then: these things, these relationships, and the nature of our interactions, are precisely the things that are rare and are thus worthy of cherishing. But in cherishing them, we will destroy the environment that sustains them. Unselfconsciousness is the prerequisite to such relationships, and the act of cherishing calls upon a very high volume of selfconsciousness, doesn't it? It is the nature of such things to confound protection. They are miraculous because they are rare, and they are valuable because they refuse to be domesticated into being an easily repeatable and accessible experience. The possibility of it all slipping away from you makes its presence in your life all the more amazing; and the moment you shackle it and hoard it greedily to yourself, you will find it tasteless and not worth the trouble it took to mummify it into a museum exhibit in your memory.

*

And here's another thought for you: believe in the value of second chances. It is an act of high charity if you are willing to unequivocally give others second chances, opportunities to start over and to set things right. This is the manifestation of the virtue of forgiveness in real life. And, when you are on the receiving end of forgiveness, is there anything as tempting, as seductive as a second chance? It has the allure of the familiar, of going back to a set of circumstances that you recognise and remember. It also has the allure of anticipation, springing from the hope that, knowing what happened the last time, you can make this time end up better. A second chance in this way imbues both the promise of the future and the promise of the past.

But when you take second chances for granted, then there is the seed for complacency. There is, perhaps, a source of what Joel was talking about a few days back - the Kunderan lightness of being, a sense of perceived significance being disporportionately small compared to the actual importance of the issue at hand. The feeling of not being bothered by life, because you are secured in your belief that your decisions are not final, that consequences are not immutable, and that you can try, try again. The old motto for industriousness and steadfastness thus becomes an excuse for irresponsibility.

The trick, then, is to accept the occurrence of second chances as natural, without allowing yourself to stop putting in effort every chance you get. The former allows you to recognise and utilisethese opportunities when they come along, while the latter makes sure that the utilisation is of a worthwhile nature. How, then, to establish this balance? How to appreciate mercy without sinking into complacency?

G. B. Shaw

[Caesar] is interrupted by an outcry as of an old man in the extremity of misfortune. It draws near rapidly: and Theodotus rushes in, tearing his hair, and squeaking the most lamentable exclamations. Rufio steps back to stare at him, amazed at his frantic condition. Pothinus turns to listen.

Theodotus: [On the steps, with uplifted arms] Horror unspeakable! Woe, alas! Help!

Rufio: What now?

Caesar: [frowning] Who is slain?

Theodotus: Slain! Oh, worse than the death of ten thousand men! Loss irreparable to mankind!

Rufio: What has happened, man?

Theodotus: [rushing down the hall between them] The fire has spread from your ships. The first of the seven wonders of the world perishes. The library of Alexandria is in flames.

Rufio: Psha! [Quite relieved, he goes up to the loggia and watches the preparations of the troops on the beach]

Caesar: Is that all?

Theodotus: [unable to believe his senses] All! Caesar: will you go down to posterity as a barbarous soldier too ignorant to know the value of books?

Caesar: Theodotus: I am an author myself; and I tell you it is better that the Egyptians should live their lives than dream them away with the help of books.

Theodotus: [kneeling, with genuine literary emotion: the passion of the pedant] Caesar: once in ten generations of men, the world gains an immortal book.

Caesar: [inflexible] If it did not flatter mankind, the common executioner would burn it.

Theodotus: Without history, death will lay you beside your meanest soldier.

Caesar: Death will do that in any case. I ask no better grave.

Theodotus: What is burning there is the memory of mankind.

Caesar: A shameful memory. Let it burn.

Theodotus: [wildly] Will you destroy the past?

Caesar: Ay, and build the future with its ruins. [Theodotus, in despair, strikes himself on the temples with his fists] But harken, Theodotus, teacher of kinds: you who valued Pompey's head no more than a shepherd values an onion, and who now kneel to me, with tears in your old eyes, to plead for a few sheepskins scrawled with errors. I cannot spare you a man or a bucket of water just now; but you shall pass freely out of the palace. Now, away with you to Achillas; and borrow his legions to put out the fire. [He hurries him to the steps]

- Extracted from "Caesar and Cleopatra: a History", Three Plays for Puritans (G. B. Shaw, 1898)

The book itself was printed in 1949, the year before Shaw passed away. I found it in the shelves of a Sydney bookshop, and its venerable pages are yellowed and coming apart at the seams. On the one hand, I am loath to use such rude materials as modern scotch tape to mend it; but then again, if this book were to disintegrate entirely, I would not find a copy to replace it in Singapore. And it has entertained me marvelously well so far.

This play, a prequel, as it were, to Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, appeals to me more on first reading than the other venerable work. Partly, I think, it is because it is the more modern work, and the English is thus more readable. But also, it is a comedy, albeit a very clever and wry one. In it, a conqueror makes a queen out of a child, and she clings to the usurper of her empire, taking him as the model after which she fashions her own puppet rule of her dominion. It is absurd, yet tragically and believably so; it is funny, yet uncomfortably so. And I find myself decoding its meanings and subtexts far more easily than I did the Shakespearan work.

It hasn't been all that long since I read Thornton's Our Town, the last script that I enjoyed muchly. And I realise that these months have been filled with a lot of good books, recommended by friends and by reputation alike. This has been my blessing, and my bounty, I guess.

*

After school today, met up with Joel, and spent a few delightful hours chatting about literature, philosophy and all those things that make life worthwhile. I realise that I am poaching as many ideas from him as from works that I have read to bring to class. Outside the theories of memory and communication, my philosophies are a pastiche of other people's thinking. Overwhelmingly, I find that I am a much better conduit than I am a source; I lack the quickness of mind to fashion anything that is really original and incisive, and so I make do with what others provide me with: little snippets of wisdom, flashes of insight and pieces of experience. And out of this I try to make a pattern that makes sense and is practicable.

We were talking about communication. I said that language's highest, even only, purpose is communication, and he brought up the Post-modernist idea that language is all about associations and signs, many of which are self-reflexive. Take, for example, the idea of love; there is no practical common definition, unlike, say, the idea of a table, and when we talk about love, we can't separate it from our own individual and unique ideas of what love is. The term would be meaningless without our personal associations. And thus, when we use that word, and arguably every other word, we are talking about ourselves rather than about some objective abstract idea. And so, communication is essentially self-indulgent; we talk to others not to better know what they think, but to better know what we ourselves think. And this is related to the idea that the key to ourselves lies in other people, that they hold the element that can act as a catalyst that causes our selves to alchemically transform into something greater.

And, knowing this, one is vulnerable to stripping everything of its lyrical, associative meanings, to treating intense emotional connotations to words as inherently suspicious and distorting, to the Kunderan idea of "depriving ourselves of the right to tragedy", or something like that (excuse my misquoting). But I don't find such ruthless deconstructivism a necessary result of the awareness of the linguistic quicksand that we all operate in. I know that I am being sentimental; that I am manipulating, perhaps over-manipulating, your impressions of what I am actually saying, influencing your impressions of my ideas and, by extension, of my self. But the awareness is something to be enjoyed, isn't it? Consciousness of something is still desirable, whether it is philosophically or morally sound to partake in it. More experience is better, isn't it? And who can fully deprive himself of self-indulgence? Who can reconcile the paradox of selflessness with self-consciousness?

These philosophical exercises aside, it is always good to meet up with the guy. It's like going for a brain massage, I guess. It's the quality of the conversations, the meeting of the minds, that is really rare, and worthy of cherishing, no matter what the coming ages will bring us.